Wednesday, June 21, 2017

The Trail Beyond (Lone Star/Monogram, 1934)

Possibly the best of 'em

OK, yes. I agree. I know I said that was
enough John Wayne B-Westerns for a while. But I did quote General MacArthur and
say, “I shall return”. To the theme, I mean. I agree, it took Doug over two
years to arrive back in the Philippines and the local population (not to
mention the Japanese) would have been mighty surprised if he had turned up the
Wednesday after leaving. Still, as far as blogposting is concerned, a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do, as any
Western-lover knows, and when Western bloggers are on a kick, they are on a
kick. I can’t help it.

And there’s another reason. The Trail Beyond is the last
Monogram/Lone Star John Wayne Western to be reviewed on this blog. We have now
watched, ruminated on and discussed all of them. As you know, there were
sixteen, from Riders of Destiny in October
1933 to Paradise Canyon in July 1935.
And do you know what? I think The Trail
Beyond might be the very best of them!

OK, there are a couple of classic
elements missing. There’s no crusty old-timer, Gabby Hayes, for example, and
Duke rides a bay, then a palomino, and not his white horse Duke. And there’s no
sign of Yakima Canutt either (he did the stunts OK but didn’t appear as a henchman). But
everything else is there and the usual suspects firmly in place: RN Bradbury
directed, at his usual breakneck pace; Archie Stout was at the camera, giving
Rob those flashy fast pans and snazzy fades he liked so much; Paul Malvern produced;
Lindsley Parsons wrote the script. Yup, all’s right with the world.

Another reason I like this picture is that it
was one of the few times Noah Beery Sr. and Noah Beery Jr. appeared in the same
movie. There they are together, left, with Duke and an unnamed Indian. Portly Beery Sr. (who challenged leading lady Verna Hillie to a drinking
contest on the set of The Trail Beyond;
history does not record who won) was a veteran of the silent days who made the
transition to talkies, appearing in 50 Westerns from 1917 to 1945, and his son
Beery Jr., only 21 at the time of The
Trail Beyond, first appeared on the screen as a child actor in 1920, when
he was seven, and was still doing TV shows in 1986. He outdid his dad by
appearing in no fewer than 174 Westerns, over a period of more than sixty
years. I actually think Noah Beery Jr. was a fine Western actor. (As well as
being great as Jim Rockford’s dad).

In The
Trail Beyond he plays Wabi, a “half-breed”, wanted for murder (but falsely
accused of course) who is an old school pal of our hero Rod Drew (Wayne, who
unusually was not John Something) and Rod helps Wabi escape from a speeding
(and very modern) train. They plunge into the water (or their stunt doubles do
anyway) while the train passes over a high trestle.

You see Rod has been asked to go up to Canada
(yup, it’s a Canadian story, with redcoats instead of bluecoats, but to all
intents and purposes it’s a straight Western, with attractive Sierra Nevada
locations doing duty for ‘somewhere in Canada’). Rod is charged by a friend
(James A Marcus) with finding a lost niece, daughter of his disappeared
brother, and bringing her back to live with her uncle and inherit his ranch.
That’s when Rod bumps into Wabi. Thenceforth they get into all manner of
scrapes together.

Purists regard movies set in Canada, or indeed
in Mexico or other countries than the US West, as not true Westerns at all. But
this one is pure B-Western, regardless of setting. All the classic Western
action takes place. It just happens to be north of the border.

Now, not only do we have a brace of Beerys, we
also have Earl Dwire the Great, habitual character actor in these Lone Star
oaters, noted for his lugubriosity, and he plays Benoit, a French-Canadian
henchman of the bad guy Jules LaRocque, renegade trader, played by Robert
Frazer. The two bad guys, in their French-Canadian uniforms, are pictured left. The ‘French’ accents of both Dwire and Frazer are alone worth the
purchase price of the DVD.

There’s a classic B-Western scene when Duke
and Noah Jr. burst into an abandoned cabin and find two skeletons at the table.
They also find a sack of gold and the map to where the gold mine is. Now you
and I might find this all rather implausible, but remember the gullibility and
average age of the audience then. Of course LaRocque gets wind of the map and
will stoop to any skullduggery to get hold of it.

There are the usual stunts, especially the
horse falls, which I hate. At one point Duke and Noah Jr. gallop up to a cliff
over a lake. “We’ve got to jump!” cries Wayne. What he meant was, our poor
mounts have to jump. At one point the hero is supposed to leap from the saddle
of his galloping steed onto the buckboard of the baddy, but it goes wrong and
Yak (presumably) doesn’t make it, falling into the dusty trail. But he gamely
remounts, gallops alongside again and this time he succeeds. They left it in,
and it looks more realistic than many a stunt.

There’s a canoe chase which was probably the
prototype for Bullitt. Duke makes
good use of his classic roundhouse punch. It all culminates in an attack by
LaRocque and his gang (inc. Earl) on the trading post of Newsome (Noah Sr.).
Benoit has hitherto emptied all the ammunition boxes in Newsome’s post but it
doesn’t seem to affect them. They hold the gang off with a rate of fire that
may only be described as profligate while Rod rides to the nearby police post
to return with the Mounties at full gallop.

So it all ends well and Rod gets the girl (oh,
I forgot to say there was a girl, but you knew that).

Hillie. I wonder who won that drinking contest? My money'd be on Noah.

You know, these Lone Star Westerns were huge
amounts of fun. There were nine in 1934 alone, and as I said earlier, I reckon
this one could be the pick of the bunch.

Someone forgot to renew the copyright on them
with the result that they are all in the public domain. The downside of that is
that many have been copied and recopied, and even edited, until the print
quality is dismal. So you take pot luck. But the print I saw of this one was
good.